Stuck At An Impasse

DSA Needs to Prioritize Movement Building, Not Trailing the Democrats.

By Philip Locker

2021 was a year of malaise for DSA and the Left. The widespread exhaustion and burnout after two years of Covid was certainly a factor, but it does not explain why during this same pandemic there was an unprecedented wave of BLM protests in the US and huge movements in some other countries. The movement for Black Lives in the summer of 2020 was followed by an ebb in social movements and an offensive by the right on issues of crime and policing in 2021. Initial hopes in Biden have turned into bitter disappointment and a sense of helplessness in the face of opposition from right-wing Democrats in the Senate represented by Manchin and Sinema.

After a surge of growth in 2020, DSA has stagnated at just under 95,000 members. Active participation in chapters and campaigns has generally fallen. Faced with a sharp change in the political terrain, DSA and the wider Left has struggled to gain its bearings and arrive at a new strategic orientation fit for this new period.

From 2016 to 2020 DSA was able to grow exponentially in a political situation marked by two main axes, one pro-Bernie and the other anti-Trump. DSA brought together the most radical wing of supporters of Bernie Sanders and a new generation of young people politicized by Trump, BLM, environmental activism, and a new wave of feminism. DSA stood out for its bold socialist profile, activism, and offer of a democratic membership organization. It’s most successful tactic was electing socialist candidates on the Democratic ballot line (such as AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Julia Salazar). 

While these candidates were described by the media as socialists, the reality was more complicated. Most of them did not call themselves socialist in their public facing material or offer a clear socialist program, but they did run boldly against the Democratic establishment and championed a series of radical reforms (Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, Tuition Free Higher Education, Abolish ICE, Tax the Rich, etc). 

While a majority of DSA activists hoped that this was part of a “dirty break” strategy to build towards a workers party, in practice these candidates have generally not used their campaigns or public offices to promote the idea of a workers party or a party surrogate like DSA. However these weaknesses were less visible while Trump was in power and DSA was rapidly growing.

Reorientation under the Biden Administration

New questions are posed for the Left with Biden’s election. Unfortunately, the August 2021 DSA National Convention was a missed opportunity to have a thorough political discussion of these issues. 

This reflects the pragmatic ideology dominant in DSA. In this context, “pragmatism” doesn’t mean being “practical” or “realistic” as it is commonly understood, but instead refers to a distinct philosophy which is highly influential in the US. Rather than developing strategy based on principles and theory, pragmatists’ primary concern is “will it work?” Another key tenant of this philosophy is that knowledge comes from following the facts and experience. Pragmatism in the US labor movement and on the Left is often expressed as hostility to theoretical and political debate, instead favoring practical and organizational questions (ie #DoTheWork). 

In contrast, Marxism argues that human experience is shaped by underlying ideological assumptions that limit which facts are perceptible and how they are interpreted. It also shows us that many practical errors can be avoided with the assistance of a correct theory and the principles derived from it.

The pragmatic outlook at the DSA convention was accompanied by conservative complacency which maintained that socialists should continue with the basic strategy that has resulted in so much success over recent years. Yet a few weeks after the convention a number of events started to show that in fact, this strategy was increasingly impractical.

The “Bowman Affair” brought to the surface a growing unease with the opportunism of DSA’s four members of Congress (and DSA’s 150 elected members more generally). Increasingly, there is recognition that DSA has no meaningful say in the political positions or strategies of these representatives.

[BOX:] Reform & Revolution organized a discussion with Andy Sernatinger from the Tempest Collective and Brandon Madson from R&R about Bowman, Palestine and DSA. You can listen to that meeting including all comments from the floor at tinyurl.com/RnR-BowmanPalestineDSA [END]

The November 2021 elections also revealed significant political vulnerabilities in the Left’s “Abolitionist” position when challenged by the right in front of mass working class audiences, including in communities of color. 

The decisive defeat of DSA member India Walton in the Buffalo mayor’s race, despite winning the Democratic primary, has also shaken the belief that DSA has discovered a new formula for socialist success through the Democratic ballot line that had eluded socialists for the past 100+ years.

The Coming Midterm Disaster for the Democrats

Biden and the Democrats, as the current managers of US capitalism, now oversee a society buffeted by a series of crises – an ongoing Covid pandemic, high levels of inflation hitting workers’ pocket books, structural racism and sexism, intensifying climate disaster, and non stop global instability and conflicts. 

Biden’s average job approval dropped from a peak of 56 percent at the beginning of April 2021 to 40 percent in early February 2022 (Real Clear Politics). ABC News reported in November that “if the midterm elections were today, 51 percent of registered voters say they’d support the Republican candidate in their congressional district, 41 percent say the Democrat. That’s the biggest lead for Republicans in the 110 ABC/Post polls that have asked this question since November 1981.”

Barring a major change in the situation, Republicans are on course to take control of the House and possibly the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. And lurking over the horizon is the ominous threat of Trump winning the 2024 Presidential election.

While the liberal media continues to obsess over January 6th and the danger of a far-right insurrection, the reality is that the failure of the Democrats in power is what’s paving the way for a resurgence of Trump’s Republicans. To counter the danger of the Republicans, the Left must focus on organizing mass movements that can change the balance of power in society, along with building a working class alternative to the failed politics of the Democratic and Republican parties.

The Left has generally fallen into two traps in trying to understand and relate to the Biden administration. One is an ultra-left, dogmatic refusal to recognize that while Biden is a ruling class politician, he has swung away from neoliberalism, instead pursuing an alternative capitalist policy of liberal reforms (at least so far). The other, far more common mistake is an opportunist policy of supporting Biden, drawing away from adopting a militant oppositional position towards the Democratic leadership.

Biden and the Congressional Democratic leadership put forward a series of policies in 2021 that represented a distinct shift to the left compared to the Obama and Clinton administrations. Rather than neoliberal austerity, Biden pushed through the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March 2021. This was a continuation of  the massive stimulus that Trump and the Democrats in Congress carried out in response to Covid, but with a more pronounced pro-worker slant. It provided additional $1,400 relief payments, monthly child support payments, hundreds of billions of dollars in relief for state and local governments, and continued the major expansion of unemployment benefits through September 2021, among other expansions of social welfare. 

The result of this unprecedented surge in government spending under both Trump and Biden lead to a significant fall in poverty in the US in 2020 (New York Times, September 14, 2021). It is also estimated that there was a further 40 percent fall in child poverty in 2021 as a result of Biden’s monthly child payments (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). 

This policy was a response by the ruling class to the danger of an economic meltdown, the need to mitigate the public health and social damage of Covid, an effort to upgrade US infrastructure in the face of growing competition from China, and a recognition from a wing of the establishment that social and economic inequality is reaching levels dangerous to the stability of US capitalism.

In line with this, Biden put forward even more ambitious policies such as a $15 minimum wage, the PRO Act, and the Build Back Better social welfare bill. However, all of these have been blocked by a conservative wing of the Democrats, backed up by Corporate America’s hostility to higher taxes and stronger unions.

Given this stalled agenda, the defeats of the Democrats in the November 2021 elections, and plunging public support, Biden is signaling he will tack back towards the “center.”

The Tasks for the Left

What are the main tasks for the Left in this situation? As Neal Meyer argued in Jacobin:

[I]t’s time for the left wing in Congress to call its millions of supporters and activists to action. Bernie could revive his promise to be an ‘organizer in chief.’ He may not be president, but he can still play that role.

With their resources and support, Bernie and the Squad could begin a relentless campaign of speeches, ads, petitions, rallies, marches, and demonstrations calling on Democrats to put the agenda they claim to support to a vote and to apply pressure against right-wing Democrats. They could rally unions and community organizations, or mobilize the tens of thousands of Democratic Socialists of America members ready to jump into a new national campaign, or link up with the 1.3 million workers whose union contracts expire this year and who might go on strike.

Why not organize a march on Washington? Or organize mass occupations of the offices of recalcitrant Democrats? … Both Sinema and Manchin will be up for reelection in 2024. Start recruiting now, in a big and public manner, for primary challenges. Set up pickets outside the offices of Manchin and Sinema’s major donors. After all, they’re the ones who seem to call the shots.

This is 100 percent correct and is part of the fundamental message that socialists in Congress, unions, and in different social movements need to hammer home again and again: We can not rely on Biden or the Democrats even if they pledge to vote the right way – working people need to organize determined mass struggle if we are to have a chance of overcoming the resistance of big business and right-wing Democrats.

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A New Strategy is Needed for DSA

DSA has been stuck in a strategic impasse since Biden entered the White House. We believe that DSA needs a new strategy to meet the new challenges facing the Left under Biden. In our view, the most pressing tasks are:

1) Prioritize Movement Building

With political terrain blocked for now, working people and activists are increasingly likely to turn to social struggle. In 2022 DSA should prioritize:

• Unionizing Starbucks, strike solidarity, and preparations for the 2023 UPS contract. These are key ways to build working class power and grow DSA as an organized force in the labor movement. 
• Campaigning for Biden to cancel student debt. 
• Building a socialist feminist movement which helps organize nationwide protests to defend abortion rights.
  • Climate Justice. The 2021 DSA convention gave a mandate to the National Political Committee to prioritize building a national Green New Deal campaign, but so far not much has happened. 

2) Reboot DSA’s Electoral Strategy 

Electoral work has dominated too much of DSA’s activity without being linked to building DSA and to promoting a distinctly socialist message and a class struggle approach. Electoral work is a valuable tactic, but it is secondary to building mass movements, workers’ organizations, and raising consciousness. We need to run candidates who use their campaigns to promote DSA and social movements. 

DSA candidates need to sharply delineate themselves from Biden and the Democratic establishment, running as a clear cut left-wing alternative to the status quo of Democratic rule. This requires a sharp oppositional stance towards the Democratic leadership and points towards a dirty break from the Democratic Party. This is the starting point of any serious strategy to actively build DSA as a working class party that can prepare the way for a break with the pro-capitalist Democrats.

Rather than tamping down working class discontent under Biden, (telling workers “don’t worry, inflation is temporary!”), our job is to mobilize popular anger into left-wing opposition to the Democrats and Corporate America. Only in this way can the Left offer an alternative to public discontent being exploited by the reactionary right around Trump and the Republicans. 

3) Build a revolutionary Marxist wing of DSA

DSA campaigns for a fundamental alternative for working class and oppressed people starting with union rights for all workers, Medicare for All including abortion and reproductive healthcare, cancelling student debt, a Green New Deal, immigrant rights and anti-racism. But above all DSA needs to link the fight for every reform to the need to overthrow capitalism, imperialism, and all systems of oppression in order to establish a democratic socialist society throughout the world. 

Building a revolutionary Marxist wing of DSA that challenges the prevailing pragmatism, anarcho-liberalism, and reformism on the Left will provide a principled and strategic political center that can help us navigate the opportunist and sectarian pressures exerted on a mass socialist party rooted in the working class. If you agree, please join our caucus: reformandrevolution.org/join/.  

Reform & Revolution is also eager to collaborate with other Marxist forces in DSA to identify common initiatives and campaigns to help strengthen DSA and build support within the organization for class struggle and Marxist politics.